WSU researchers John Harrison and Bridget Deemer report in a new paper in BioScience that decomposing organic material in reservoirs of all sorts is an important sources of the greenhouse gas methane.
In their synthesis review of 100 research papers published on the topic since 2000, the researchers and their collaborators established that methane emissions were about 25 percent higher per acre than previously understood on a given reservoir. That was because the researchers looked not only at methane diffused from the surface of lakes, but at gas in bubbles rising to the surface.
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